our story isn't over

You make my head feel like a busy, New York City street the second your name lights up on my cell phone.

It doesn't happen often, and it hadn't happened for a year and a half until recently, but when it does i don't know how to feel.

You were my first love, and first loves are hard to forget. I truly believe that the first person you fall in love with will always have a piece of your heart. It's never whole again- no matter how much you move on, how many more people you fall in love with, or how much you give to the next person- there's something special about the first time you give your heart away. Or maybe it's because your first love usually ends up in your first real heartbreak and you never quite get all of the pieces back.

I don't know what kept me with you for all of those years. I was young, naive, and immature i guess. But i loved you. Oh man, did I love you. I think i would have fought to be with you until i couldn't go on. I would have been content being with you and only you forever and ever. But you didn't feel the same. And to fight any longer would be foolish. You gave up on me not once, but twice, and it broke me down more and more. You treated me terrible in those last few months, as if I were a stranger you never even cared about. You left me a ghost. You left me broken. You left me.

It took so long for me to get back on my own two feet and finally feel anything again. And as everyone would tell me, time did heal. But no one ever really listens to that phrase...time heals. But healing doesn't make it go away, it just makes it bearable. It's like a scar. There's the initial wound and it hurts like hell, almost to the point where you think you'd rather just be dead at this point, and then slowly but surely your cut closes up and then there is the scab. You pick at it a few times and it hurts all over again. And eventually you have a scar, and it fades and fades, but it's never gone. There's always something to remind you.

And then i met him, and he swept me off my feet. He showed me what it was like to truly be loved and he gave me everything you never even thought to give. Everything that hurt finally went away with a flash of his smile and with the touch of his hand I felt like I had found my real forever. A month into the relationship I could see myself with him fifty years down the road. I had never loved someone this way before, not even you. Months in though, little fights started poisoning our relationship but we worked at them. I still love him with my whole heart and i still fall asleep next to him but every now and then you slip into my dreams, out of nowhere, just like in real life and in my dreams I miss you.

I never thought, in a million years, you'd come back to me again. I'm over you, I am, I worked way too hard at it not to be. But when I get a text alert at 2:30 in the morning, and i see your name on the caller ID, my head and heart start a war. I don't think it's love, i think it's missing who you were. I have this idea of you at sixteen in my head but six years later that isn't who you are.

But for some reason tonight, it hit me hard. You know me way too well not to know how to win my heart, even for five seconds. I hate you for making me feel like this. I hate you for what you did to me way back when. I hate you for making me second guess the perfection I have now. I hate you for never really disappearing from my life. I hate you for having the nerve to ever even think I'd take you back. I hate you for your late night texts. I hate you for who you've become. I hate you for it all.

You texted me tonight and said: "I just have a weird feeling that our story isn't over. But clearly I'm the only one thinking that."

And I'd never admit it, to you or myself out loud, but...I've never stopped thinking that exact same thing.